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A Lesson on Focus by Arnold Schwarzenegger

As real estate agents, we seem to get easily distracted by other agents, the news, interest rates, our brokers and hundreds of other outside influences. Losing focus is a recipe for disaster.

One of the most powerful examples of focus can be found in an older documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger titled “Pumping Iron” This documentary highlighted Arnold’s training for the 1975 Mr. Olympia Body Building Championship. In this documentary, Arnold said:

"If you want to be a champion, you cannot have any outside negative influence coming in to affect you... Therefore I have to cut my emotions off and be cold in a way... If someone steals my car right now, I don't care. I can't be bothered with that. All I can do is call the insurance agency and they'll laugh about it. I trained myself for that and not to let things go into my mind. When my father died, my mother called me on the phone and said, "Your father died." This was two months before a contest. She asked me to come home to the funeral and I said "No - It's too late. He is dead and nothing can be done. Sorry I can't come home."

When I first heard Arnold say this, I was shocked. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how critical focus was for success. It doesn't matter what your goal is. If you're not 100-percent focused on accomplishing your goal, you're doomed.

Most real estate agents change course in their businesses every few weeks. Every time you change course in your business, you lose momentum.

We've all experienced this at some level. One week, we want to focus on referrals. The next week, we change our minds and decide to go after seller prospects. A week later, we decide to go after buyers because we didn't get a new listing. Not only do we change our target market of prospects often, we also change how we market from week-to-week without much consistency.

Zero focus.

The next time you think about changing your focus stop and think about Arnold and ask yourself the following question: Would Arnold allow himself to be distracted by what I'm considering?